What 'White Privilege' Really Means - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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white privilege racism stereotypes race broken windows culture
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This week’s conversation is with Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy.”
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My first book, “Race and Mixed Race” (1991) was an analysis of the incoherence of U.S. black/white racial categories in their failure to allow for mixed race. In “Philosophy of Science and Race,” I examined the lack of a scientific foundation for biological notions of human races, and in “The Ethics and Mores of Race,” I turned to the absence of ideas of universal human equality in the Western philosophical tradition.
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Critical philosophy of race, like critical race theory in legal studies, seeks to understand the disadvantages of nonwhite racial groups in society (blacks especially) by understanding social customs, laws, and legal practices.
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What’s happening in Ferguson is the result of several recent historical factors and deeply entrenched racial attitudes, as well as a breakdown in participatory democracy.
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In Ferguson, the American public has awakened to images of local police, fully decked out in surplus military gear from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are deploying all that in accordance with a now widespread “broken windows” policy, which was established on the hypothesis that if small crimes and misdemeanors are checked in certain neighborhoods, more serious crimes will be deterred. But this policy quickly intersected with police racial profiling already in existence to result in what has recently become evident as a propensity to shoot first.
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How does this “broken windows” policy relate to the tragic deaths of young black men/boys? N.Z.:People are now stopped by the police for suspicion of misdemeanor offenses and those encounters quickly escalate.
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Young black men are the convenient target of choice in the tragic intersection of the broken windows policy, the domestic effects of the war on terror and police racial profiling.
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Why do you think that young black men are disproportionately targeted? N.Z.: Exactly why unarmed young black men are the target of choice, as opposed to unarmed young white women, or unarmed old black women, or even unarmed middle-aged college professors, is an expression of a long American tradition of suspicion and terrorization of members of those groups who have the lowest status in our society and have suffered the most extreme forms of oppression, for centuries.
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Probably all of the ways in which whites are better off than blacks in our society are forms of white privilege.
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So young black males, who have less status than they do, and are already more likely to be imprisoned than young white males, are natural suspects.
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Besides the police, a large segment of the white American public believes they are in danger from blacks, especially young black men, who they think want to rape young white women. This is an old piece of American mythology that has been invoked to justify crimes against black men, going back to lynching. The perceived danger of blacks becomes very intense when blacks are harmed.
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The term “white privilege” is misleading. A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right. It’s not so much that being white confers privilege but that not being white means being without rights in many cases. Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right.
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that is what “white privilege” is meant to convey, that whites don’t have many of the worries nonwhites, especially blacks, do.
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Other examples of white privilege include all of the ways that whites are unlikely to end up in prison for some of the same things blacks do, not having to worry about skin-color bias, not having to worry about being pulled over by the police while driving or stopped and frisked while walking in predominantly white neighborhoods, having more family wealth because your parents and other forebears were not subject to Jim Crow and slavery.
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Police in the United States are mostly white and mostly male. Some confuse their work roles with their own characters. As young males, they naturally pick out other young male opponents. They have to win, because they are the law, and they have the moral charge of protecting.
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Over half a century later, it hasn’t changed much in the United States. Black people are still imagined to have a hyper-physicality in sports, entertainment, crime, sex, politics, and on the street. Black people are not seen as people with hearts and minds and hopes and skills but as cyphers that can stand in for anything whites themselves don’t want to be or think they can’t be.
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race is through and through a social construct, previously constructed by science, now by society, including its most extreme victims. But, we cannot abandon race, because people would still discriminate and there would be no nonwhite identities from which to resist. Also, many people just don’t want to abandon race and they have a fundamental right to their beliefs. So race remains with us as something that needs to be put right.